I agree with konni in saying that we have made an "investment." But not in the sense that we are shareholders or in any way entitled to a say in how or when the game is made. If we can use that term at all, it should be in a sense that we have made an investment in these men, by showing our interest and support of the great idea they need help in making a reality.Im a new follower of PA. I remember seeing an article on it a year ago and then saw it on sale this week and scooped it up. I just hope PA's feature on the Steam sales catalogue was not the point of maximum velocity for this title. That would be very sad to see.

It's not very often I agree with xander ( ) but he's right about this.

Nobody has ever promised a guaranteed return on the money you've handed over. You have already been given the product, liability begins and ends there - and in the case of kickstarters and early access games, even that isn't a contractual obligation.

The "investment" here is that you're getting access to something early, that's it. You're helping to support the developer's lifestyle, keep them eating and drinking and (hopefully) making the game you want. Sometimes you might even have influence over a feature that they change as a result of early access feedback. Or, in some tiers of the pledge, your name or face in the game.

Basically, what you've done is give a company money in the hope that at the end of it you'll get a decent and complete product. It's all "in good faith". IV could easily turn around and say that development is over, they're scrapping the product and update a patch that basically stops the game functioning. No agreement has been made to stop them. An update might come along (it won't, but for arguments sake) that formats your hard drive and you have no recourse because that's covered by the "at your own risk" part of the development cycle.

When you hand over money it's sometimes hard to accept that you might not get anything back from it. That's human nature. But it doesn't mean they owe you anything. You can hand a beggar a wad of 50s if he says he needs a place to stay, but you only have his word that he's not going to blow it all on crack

thekillergreece wrote:If you never knew the huge mistake IV done: They almost went bankrupty because they overdid on hiring people.

For me its fine for 1 developer to make this game(Chris Delay) and bring updates monthly. Its pretty fine...I am not in hurry for the game to be in BETA or released status...And of course, Prison Architect will remain in Alpha for very long time because major conents are not implemented yet.

I am pretty fine with the work of team...They get money because thousand people like their art, game and support the game, it is not just because IV wants money for their game in order to continue.

Mark isn't a developer. Ryan Sumo (the "models" guy [really a sprite guy]) is not a developer. The sound guy (is that still Alistair Lindsey(sp?)?) is not a developer. Chris and John are the only full-time developers at IV (and I am fairly certain that John has a fairly well defined role---I get the impression that he is busy doing other things as well, and that he is primarily working on optimizations and a few other similar tasks). There are also a few contract programmers which, depending on what you believe the role of a developer vs work-for-hire programmer is, could be considered developers.

Of course, the important point is not that Chris is the *only* person working on the game, but that IV is a very small studio. Whether there are one or ten developers, the pace of development is appropriate for the team, and history has shown that IV bringing on large numbers of extra staff is unwise. Can we stop being pedantic now?

I'm also wondering about the degree of Introversion's involvement in developing this game. It's not only the amount of changes that are made in the game over the time (public alpha is going on for well more than two years now, and still there are some important features missing), but also their presence here in the forums and in the bug tracker.

The board is full of users' proposals and discussions, bug reports and feature requests, ideas and observations, feedback and questions, but of the three staff members in the board (excluding those who haven't posted for years now), Mark has been completely inactive for well over half a year, John hasn't done more than 11 posts in 2014, and Chris too doesn't do much more than one edit a month. Why does no one answer to the feedback the users are giving? Where do we know from that anybody even cares? Shouldn't the public alpha be about the users' feedback influencing the final product? It's hard to tell which feedback they are using, which proposals they decline, and which suggestions they just didn't notice.

In Mantis, there are more than 3500 cases open currently. And while it's totally legit to concentrate on feature development rather than bug fixing in the alpha phase, it looks like nobody cares about the bug reports (and feature requests!) made there at all. Just browse a couple of cases there and you'll easily find many duplicates and other cases (misunderstandings, questions, unsuitable proposals) that could long be closed, even many cases about issues long being fixed. And I've seen no statement of a developer in any of these open cases, too. Such a badly kept bug tracker makes it look like a big waste of time to report bugs, even if I was invited to do so.

Don't get me wrong, I know that I bought something that isn't finished yet, nor would it have a release date announced. I see that Introversion is a small company that has a history of spending its money too fast and is now trying to do its business carefully. Of course I know that having such a limited staff spending hours over hours in the forum would be a waste of resources. Being a software developer myself, I know that all the fine details in a program take much more time than the getting the basic concept to work, and that it gets harder the more complex things grew, and that some developments look simple to the user, while causing headaches to the developers for weeks and months. And yes, I am having fun being part of the development of such a great game, seeing it progressing and possibly being able to contribute to it in regards of having all the features I would like to have in such a game, in a quality I approved, too.However, I still get the feeling that Introversion isn't dedicating too much effort into this game, and if they are, they seem to lack communication about it towards the people who crowdfunded this project.

Konni wrote:... with more than 250,000 investors at their back, IV should really push foward now to bring this game out of alpha status.

Not a court in the world would consider a pre-release purchaser an investor to the degree that they have control (or even stake) in the company. The entitlement kids seem to award themselves when they drop ~$20 on a pre-release game always boggles me.

Also that $9M is sales capital, not game budget. They're not looking to fold that $9M back into this one title, they'd come out of development no better than they went in financially.

Also hasn't the game only been in development since Q3 2012? They're a tiny team who don't want to expand rapidly and face financial issues after launch. I'm not sure you know how long a game development cycle typically is, and frankly a lot development cycle is a good thing, it means they really want to pour a lot of features into the title, and not make it light to speed up alpha time.

And honestly the current trend of pre-complete releases, and calling all the purchasers "testers" really muddles the role. None of us are on the payroll, none of us have design or development backgrounds that we were hired for. We're not spending our days playing and re-playing micro-scenarios in game and logging debug reports and trying to cause crashes. Some of us go the extra mile, sure, but we're not employed to the game like an actual tester would be. We wouldn't be let go if we stopped testing.

We're far closer to "alpha users". We bought the privilege to have access to the trickle builds before the general public gets access. No more or less. Our input's appreciated, but we're not asked to complete 10 bug reports a day, and in return for not having to do that we're not paid for the role of tester.

So let's not have any disillusionment on our investment to the title, much less Introversion.

I didnt read everything you said but your paying for an alpha game. This is not a kickstarter where your backing the game in funding. You are getting a game and for everything out there they could just stop with updates and publish the game as is and there is nothing you can do. They could say the game is finished in there eyes and for all points of view your getting a game that is playable so your view point is mute in that regards.